Thursday, 28 December 2006

Alan Moore's London. part 6

With the epilogue in FROM HELL it was strange coming back to this scene I'd started ten years before, with Abberline and Lees as old codgers in Bournemouth on the south coast of England. Alan had made a trip down there and taken a dozen photographs of the cemetery. I then filed the photos away until they were needed ten years later. This all sounds somewhat extraordinary to me now. I was recently talking to a young girl just out of school, telling her that I would be spending the whole of the next year on my new book (I'll tell you about it soon). She found it hard to understand that somebody could spend a whole year on one job. How little she knows. Alan planned this thing out in thorough detail and then we spent ten years seeing the plan through. Were we mad? In Greek myth Odysseus spends ten years after the Trojan war finding his way back to Greece. I remember feeling that this was very far fetched. Ten years is too long to contemplate. Too long indeed. From this side of it even more so.With the epilogue we had ten pages of two characters interacting in mid distance. This is my favourite thing to draw in the whole world. So i handled the lettering and figures and Pete Mullins took care of everything else in this one."There's no hurry." Abberline is saying.No hurry indeed.

(ps I know it wasn't literally ten years between the prologue and epilogue, but it was ten between the first page and the end of the appendix, so I feel I was taking a justifiable poetic liberty up there.)

6 Comments:

Tombstones galore! Somehow I like to spot them when travelling, and virtual journey like this isn't so bad either.

I've known a person who made his two series in 7 and 6 years, resulted in very accurate graphics. 10 years of work must seem even more so. Or is there anything you feel like changing or improving from your work?

I can't recall...during the ten years that it took to see FROM HELL to completion, what other work did you do? And how many other titles did Alan Moore do? Well...I shouldn't expect you to know that one, but roughly, he was working on other projects, yes? (Steve Bissette once showed me an Alan Moore script--it was for Swamp Thing--the damned thing amazed me--the detail amazed me. I must have stared at the pages for ten or fifteen minutes before I actually started reading them. They were like some mad art unto themselves.)

TitaI'm always changing and fixing things before I reprint. too much sometimes. On a few of those From Hell images I was selecting this week, i'd look at one, want to change it and then have to find another to fit the bill. sigh... it will never end... nothing is ever finished..HemlockDuring those ten years, a bunch of Bacchus volumes and a bunch of Alec volumes and loads of other stuff. it's all catalogued here, thanks to Guido Wesshahn:http://www.weisshahn.de/bacchus/index.htmlthanks, Juanand anonymous... you can go to blazeshappy holidays

Ten years might seem like a long time but how about Alan and Melinda with 16 years for Lost Girls. How long did Jeff Smith take to complete Bone, Dave Sim 25 years for Cerebus and if you want to include Charles Schulz Peanuts went for about 50 years or so.In future how long will Gary Spencer Millidge take to complete Strangehaven or Eric Shanower to do Age of Bronze.Maybe if you didn't have so much trouble with publishers it wouldn't have taken so long.

Did you know at the time you were working on it it would prove to be so popular. The main reason that I started reading Alan Moore was a newspaper article which said From Hell was the greatest graphic novel of all time.